How German Is It?

Photography in the exhibition, a kind of show-within-the-show, is largely documentary in style, as evident in the first section’s August Sander-like portraits by the East German Karl Heinz Mai (1920-1964), all dating to 1948. In the second section are closely observed scenes of East Berlin by Arno Fisher (b. 1920) and Ursula Arnold (b. 1929); and, from the 1980s, there are formalist architectural studies by the Bechers, Thomas Struth, Thomas Ruff and Günther Förg. Additionally, photographs by the East Germans Evelyn Richter (b. 1930), Gundula Schulze Eldowy (b. 1954), Sibylle Bergemann (b. 1941) and Barbara Metselaar-Berthold (b. 1951) reveal the psychological and social changes operating just under the surface of GDR society in its later years. Helga Paris (b. 1958) documents an early ’80s East German punk scene reminiscent of Nan Goldin’s New York, in photographs roughly contemporary with those of the latter’s Ballad of Sexual Dependency.

Also from the 1980s comes underground art from East Germany by mostly unfamiliar names such as Ralf Kerbach (b. 1956), Volker (Via) Lewandowsky (b. 1963) and Cornelia Schleime (b. 1953), whose works resonate with those by better-known Europeans and Americans.

Photographs, relics and videos document performances by Dresden’s Autoperforation Group that were lively, body-conscious romps, much in the vein of earlier actions by Austrians Otto Muehl and Günther Brus—supposedly unknown to the East German artists at the time. There is also a small survey of West German art from just before the fall of the Berlin Wall by Martin Kippenberger, Richter, Imi Knoebel, Rosemarie Trockel and Isa Genzken, who share a postmodern sensibility. Here the exhibition loses its air of urgency. Even Genzken’s Door (1988), a gritty cul-de-sac of a sculpture consisting of cracked and broken concrete slabs on a pedestal, seems less a reference to the Wall than something akin to Bruce Nauman’s generalized no-exit anomie. Richter’s blurred abstraction, Knoebel’s enigmatic geometry, Trockel’s tapestry juxtaposing pop icons and Kippenberger’s naughty self-indulgences all largely address esthetic concerns beyond anything specifically German.

The LACMA presentation finished abruptly with a video installation by Marcel Odenbach (b. 1953), No One Is Where They Intended To Go (1989-90), which includes footage of the fall of the Berlin Wall intercut with snippets showing Third Reich parades, East German protest marches and scenes from Alfred Hitchcock’s 1941 paranoid thriller Suspicion. Given the fresh yet uncertain art history presented in “Art of Two Germanys,” perhaps no curatorial flourish or group of artworks could provide this exhibition with an adequately stirring conclusion. Rightly puzzled and intrigued, the viewer departs with a host of ideas and images with which to construct new versions of postwar German art.

CurrentlyOn View“Art of Two Germanys/Cold War Cultures”at the Germanisches Nationalmuseum,Nuremberg,through Sept. 6.


1 The 1997 exhibition, “Images of Germany: Art from a Divided Land,” organized by Eckhart Gillen for the Berlin Festival, included works by 88 East and West German artists but no examples of Socialist Realism.
2 Stephanie Barron, “Blurred Boundaries: The Art of Two Germanys between Myth and History,” in Art of Two Germanys/Cold War Cultures, ed. by Barron and Sabine Eckmann,New York, Abrams, 2009, p. 13.  3 For the tempestuous nature of assessments within Germany of East German art, see Eduard Beaucamp, “The Cold War may be over, but it is still being fought in terms of its artists,” The Art Newspaper, January 2009, p. 28.  “Art of Two Germanys/Cold War Cultures” was organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in cooperation with Kulturprojeckte Berlin. The exhibition opened at LACMA [Jan. 25-Apr. 19] and is presently at the Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg [May 23-Sept. 6]; it travels to the Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin [Oct. 3, 2009-Jan. 10, 2010]. It is accompanied by a 440-page catalogue featuring 17 scholarly essays.

Michael Duncan is a West Coast-basedcritic and curator.